Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997) is a film about the fractured biographical narratives of those whose lived experiences have been erased from public memory in postdictatorship Chile.[1] The film was directed by Patricio Guzmán, who also directed The Battle of Chile, the three-part documentary which chronicles the last ten months of the Popular Unity government, culminating with the September 1973 coup. Over 20 years after The Battle of Chile was filmed, Guzmán returned to Chile with a copy of his award-winning documentary-which has never been shown in Chilean theaters—to film the encounter between the confiscated memory preserved by The Battle of Chile and the surviving protagonists of the historical events that it captured.
Guzmán’s latest film is both an act of memory and a critical commentary on the absence of referents for collective remembrance in Chile today. In Obstinate Memory, The Battle of Chile figures as the only public document that corroborates the personal narratives of the people interviewed. These narratives are never situated in the context of contemporary Chilean society. Their lack of context in the film underscores the estrangement of these recollections from Chile’s present, exposing the wrenching individualization of historical memory that has taken place in a country where “both past and present are constantly rendered banal by the dehistoricizing strategies of the media and the marketplace.”[2]
The film identifies biographical narratives, including Guzman’s own, as the only possible threads with which this unspoken history can be reconstituted. But these narratives are also fragile and ambivalent, destabilized by the trauma and loss that constitute them. In one scene, Guzmán gathers a group of Allende collaborators to watch parts of The Battle of Chile and identify individuals who appear in the film. Guzmán informants warmly recount their experiences during the Allende regime, remembering their friends and colleagues who were killed or disappeared following the military coup. One of the viewers recognizes a woman in a pro-Allende demonstration and identifies her as Carmen Vivanco. The scene quickly changes to an interview with Mrs. Vivanco, who Guzmán asks if she is the person pictured in the film. “Maybe it is,” she reponds. “I have my doubts.” Her uncertainty eloquently juxtaposes the fear of self-identification associated with the years of military repression to the fear of the wounds inflicted by memory itself, With an absent expression on her face, Carmen proceeds to give the full names of the five members of her family who were disappeared.
The estrangement of these narratives from Chile’s present is also revealed by the film’s enactments of memory. Guzmán hires a band to march through a busy pedestrian walkway in downtown Santiago while playing the tune of “Venceremos,” the anthem of the Popular Unity government. The scene focuses on the mutually unintelligible reactions of the bystanders, revealing no shared discourse about the past, no common language other than that of the music and the camera that interpellate them. This disjuncture between past and present is staged again later in the film. Guzmán takes an image of President Allende saluting crowds of supporters during a parade from a slow-moving car surrounded by personal bodyguards and juxtaposes it to a reenactment of the scene—the same bodyguards, now visibly older, marching beside an empty car on a silent and empty street with nothing but their personal recollections to make sense of their gesture. This staged juxtaposition between past and present performs the act of remembrance itself while simultaneously exposing a locality that has been emptied of all referents for collective remembrance.
The diverse and in some cases emotionally explosive responses of the high-school and university students gathered by Guzmán to view The Battle of Chile reveal the effects of 25 years of erasures and distortions on those who were very young or not yet born at the time of the military coup. A group of high-school students struggles with the moral issues raised by the film, unable to resolve the ethical dilemmas posed by either the brutality of the military regime or the Popular Unity’s assaults on the sanctity of private property. A group of economics students criticize The Battle of Chile, parrotirig the criticisms of the Allende government advanced by the neoliberal technocrats of the military regime. For another group of Students, however, the film violently breaks open the traumas of an unconfronted past and the devastating oblivion of the present. One of the final images of the film is of a student overcome by a convulsive but inaudible weeping. His inability to utter even the most minimal sound exposes “the limits of incommunicability” which individuals and societies must confront as they face the pain and trauma of their memories. [3]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marcial Godoy-Anativia is associate editor of NACLA and a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Columbia University.
NOTES
1. Chile, Obstinate Memory and the three volumes of The Battle of Chile are available an video from First Run/Icarus Films.
2. Nelly Richard, Residuos y metáforas: Ensayo de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la transición (Santiago Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1998), p 43
3. Nelly Richard, “Notas sobre La Memoria Obsitinada,” Revista de crítca cultural, No. 15 (November 1997), p. 59.
